Storage concepts in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM 6.5)

AEM server holds both content and binary data. For better deployment isolation and organizing data considering performance and scalability of AEM, the binary data(for eg media files) can be stored independently from the content nodes by configuring it.

Generally, binary data is stored in a data store, whereas content nodes are stored in a node store. Both 'data stores' and 'node stores' can be configured by updating a persistent identifier (PID) in OSGi configuration.

Say when we are working with a large number of binaries, Adobe recommends using an external data store instead of the default node stores. This provides better performance.

The external data store can be File Data Store, Amazon S3 Data Store, Azure Data Store which works well when we need to store binaries like media files.

Node store can be of two types 'Segment Node' Store & 'Document node' store. Segment node store is the basis of Adobe's TarMK implementation & document node store is the basis of AEM's MongoMK implementation in AEM6x.

Configuration PID's for each storage type is given below.

Document node store
org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.plugins.document.DocumentNodeStoreService.config

Segment Node Store
org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.segment.SegmentNodeStoreService.config

File Data Store
org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.plugins.blob.datastore.FileDataStore.config

Amazon S3 Data Store
org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.plugins.blob.datastore.S3DataStore.config PID

Azure Data Store
org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.plugins.blob.datastore.AzureDataStore.config

Summary: Thus by selecting the recommended configurations based on the requirement, we can achieve a high performing AEM instance.

Note: The concepts are the same for all AEM 6x versions, except a few minor configuration changes.

Source: https://www.aemtutorial.info/2019/05/storage-concepts-in-aem-65.html